20 Random Facts About Hannah Grace Longbottom
by Thanfiction
Summary: She will stand. Part of the Daydverse 20 Random Facts series


**1. The Leaky Cauldron has been in her family for over 800 years.**  
It's the oldest continuously operating business in the wizarding UK, and the Abbott family has been running it since it actually WAS opened by John the Abbott, a 12th century monk who was excommunicated by his monastery after they found out he still had the same powers he'd had as Aun Agnarthrall. He intended it as an apothecary, but his salves weren't nearly as good as his ale, a fact attested in that they haven't sold unguents since the first Crusades, but his very many times great granddaughter is still brewing his ale from the descendants of his yeast, though the bit about spitting on the barley for luck was omitted around the Regency era.

**2. She started working when she was four. **  
Oh, they didn't exactly have her running bar. But it was a part of her home, and like at home, she had chores, only these weren't putting her toys in the box, they were far more important. She was responsible for things like filling the salt and putting little soaps in all the rooms, and when it was busy, she got to sell packets of nuts. They were nuts for a Knut and it made her giggle sometimes, which she was quite embarrassed by until she got old enough to realize that there was a reason an adorable, golden-haired baby girl sold a LOT of packets…and it wasn't her stoic professionalism.

**3. She has always been stronger than people think. **  
She was hauling dish tubs long before she was good enough with magic to be trusted using it around the china, and even as an adult, it's more effective to use magic to levitate the tray of food while you carry four beers in each hand. She can take four full sacks of linen up three flights of steep stairs, bring 50 and 100lb sacks of barley up from the cellar, and move full barrels of ale. On her wedding night, she swept her new husband off his feet and carried him across the threshhold, something she played off as a charming joke, though she'd truthfully been worried that he'd let stupid chivalry overcome being reasonable about what those bastards had done to his back.

**4. She'll destroy you at darts. **  
The patrons in the pub started teaching her when she still had to stand on a table to be high enough, but by 10, she was playing on fair ground with some of the best of the regulars. Even on the busiest nights, she'll still join a particularly good match, and she can score a clean ton 80 long after she's slurring drunk or staggering exhausted. When she was 20, Justin introduced her to the Officer's Club and the finer points of hustling. He meant it as a prank on a few of his more misogynist colleagues, but sometimes, when finances have been tight, a pretty blonde with a wicked eye makes the rounds of the London pubs and a lot of cocky men go home with lighter wallets.

**5. She split her childhood between Kent and London. **  
Her father worked the Leaky, of course, under Grandpa Tom, and the big suite was supposed to be for their family and was when they came into the city for overnights. But her Mum had bad lungs and couldn't handle the pollution in London for long, so they properly lived near Frittendon in an oast house that had once belonged to one of the Leaky's suppliers. She loved the country and spent every possible moment outside, helping her mother tend the gardens and orchards that fed the bustling Diagon Alley kitchen, and one of the things she most regretted about going to school was missing the cobnut harvest.

**6. She can play the fiddle.**  
Her grandmother taught her by ear, and she brought it to school with her. There wasn't a band or a group per se, nothing so formal, but in the evenings in the common room, it was just sort of known that often enough someone would bring a guitar, someone else a pennywhistle or a mouth organ or whatnot, and those nights she'd get her fiddle. The ones like The Witch of Blackwater they almost all knew, and they usually sorted some version of whatever was popular on the wireless, but it was also a way of reaching across the spaces between them, and she found a magic of its own that the same instrument could be made to work so well for Justin's classically trained choral tenor introducing them to the Ave Maria and the aggressive spoken word chanting of Rowan's hip-hop.

**7. There was never a triangle.**  
Oddly, it was the older people at first that tried to push it on them as soon as it became clear that Hannah, Ernie, and Justin had formed a friendship as deep as any familial bond. They'd cluck their tongues over the 'inevitable' downfall when they get older and 'she has to choose,' and of course when they DID get older, everyone assumed her heart was being torn between the two boys. In reality, the only thing being torn was her patience…and Corrie Alder's robes when she happened to be, as the eighth person to 'console' her when Ernie started dating Morag, the proverbial last spark of the spell.

**8. She and Hermione commiserated a few times at school over being the sensible ones. **  
They first properly TALKED when they met up by accident on a Hogsmeade weekend. Harry and Justin had been shunning each other over something absurd, and it had started with making appropriate apologies and three hours later they were elbows deep in rock cakes and chocolate frogs behind Honeydukes ranting like a cauldron boiled over about how they loved them more than anything in the world but how in Merlin's name would those overwrought posturing romantics and their chivalric codes and their fragile egos FUNCTION without them? They never really scheduled these sessions after, nor really spoke much otherwise, but somehow fate seemed to know exactly when they were both just that fed up.

**9. She and Ernie told Justin's parents when he was Petrified**  
Because he needed special tutoring in additional Muggle subjects, Justin was given a special exemption to go home on the weekends. After he was stricken, Ernie and Hannah begged the Weasley twins to help them sneak out so that they could run ahead and meet Justin's parents at the train station before they could get to the castle. His mother had fallen to her knees in horror, his father pale and shaking, but she'd hugged them both and tried to be very brave and not show how much she'd been crying all week as she explained that they'd wanted to tell first so they'd know that just because some stupid magic person had hurt Justin didn't mean that there weren't magical people who loved him too.

**10. She hated her body as a teenager**  
The Abbotts were mostly Germanic stock with fairly broad streaks of Norman and Welsh here and there. It meant a strong trend towards blondes with jade green eyes that had become something of a family trademark, but it also meant that you'd never exactly call an Abbott frail. At 5'10" she was as tall as both of the boys and she'd blossomed to a broad-hipped, ample-bosomed hourglass that she was horrified to discover outweighed Justin when they were 14. She tried every crash diet, spell, and charmed product she could find with little success, and sharing a room and a best friendship with less than five feet and a hundred pounds of one of the prettiest, daintiest, most feminine witches at school did NOT help, so she hid in massive jumpers and layers of robes for most of the next few years.

**11. She developed a crush on Neville in the first DA. **  
They'd been friends since their first shared Herbology class. Her experience at home put her well ahead of most of the class who were still learning the difference between a bulb and a tuber, so she was paired with Sprout's other star pupil, a sweet, shy, but very knowledgeable Gryffindor boy with the world's least obedient toad. Beyond Herbology, though, she didn't give him a second thought until they found themselves together again in Harry's impromptu homework club. Over the year, she watched something change in him, and it was more than the six inches of new height or that he started shaving around Christmas holiday. She couldn't explain it, but it was like what her magic felt when she touched a bud about to furl, and it was as irresistible as any potion.

**12. She established surrogate parents for the young ones _that_ year. **  
It started after the first few Cruciatus curses. First years sobbing in the middle of the night. Then second and sometimes third years too as things got worse. The week after Ernie's flogging, consoling them was as much a full time job as taking care of him, and she knew something needed to be done. After a talk with Sprout, the Professor secretly unlocked the guest room at night that was supposed to be for visiting alumni, and a volunteer from the seventh year (though they did let Derek when he asked, because damned if the boy wasn't born to be a human teddy bear) would spend the night in the king-sized bed…which would also be open to anyone from the lower three years who needed to be talked to, comforted, or simply held.

**13. After the battle, she dated Lee Jordan for almost three months.**  
Despite or really because of their initial impulse to get married immediately, she and Neville decided to break up for a while following the battle. Six months minimum, to be exact, during which they swore to each see at least three other people before meeting up again to assess if what they felt was real or just a potent mix of friendship, survival, and hormones. There was Ianto Selwyn, Blaise Zabini, Barney Tutshill and Revant Chadha, plus a single awful date with Tommy Rowle that ended in St. Mungos when he tried to ignore an "I'd rather not" from a witch 5 weeks off the battlefield, but Lee was different. Funny, she'd expected, but he was more thoughtful than she'd have guessed from the so-called third Weasley Twin, and almost frighteningly brilliant. The sex was great, the conversation better, but they both agreed that the romance just wasn't there and they were better off remaining, as they still are, excellent friends.

**14. She is absolutely terrified of being alone. **  
As a child, there were always people around at the Leaky, and the walls of her bedroom were so thin that if she was scared in the oast, she could always listen hard enough to hear her parents breathing. At Hogwarts she never lived with less than five other people in the same room, and she went to live at the Leaky again after. Alone was different. Alone meant being caught on a mission and held while Snape decided what to do with you. Alone meant being locked up in a Ministry cell waiting to die. Alone meant finding the bed empty even after last call and feeling your heart freeze because your boyfriend/fiance/husband should have been home hours ago and was this the time there'd be someone from the Department coming to say they were so sorry? Alone was when you felt the weight of everyone who was gone.

**15. She put her father in a care home. **  
She still feels guilty about it, but she really had no choice. He'd always struggled with depression, even when she was young his 'sulks' were famous, but it had been bad since her mother was killed, and when the Dementors got to him in Azkaban, there was no turning back. The Healers had said it might take a while, but she'd known from the first time she saw his eyes. Something irrevocable had broken. He was almost catatonic, refusing to take care of himself at all, and she had broken their initial oath not to see each other at all during their six month separation to beg Neville for advice after she found her father having literally shat his pants and sat in it all day. It was a hard decision, but Neville and his Gran helped her and Grandpa Tom make all the necessary arrangements, and she still visits him regularly. He seems…peaceful, she hopes?

**16. She inherited the Leaky at 21. **  
She had just gotten engaged and was about halfway through her studies for a MAGI in business accounting when her Grandpa Tom had the stroke. He technically survived it by almost another year, but it took his wandhand and most of his right side, so she took over, pumping him intently for last hints and tricks. The theoretical was abandoned for the wholly practical as she found herself suddenly not merely an employee of but owner-operator of a pub with a full kitchen and bar, 16 tables, and a 22 room inn, all at the busiest commercial intersection in Wizarding Britain.

**17. She worked until the day she went into labor with the twins.**  
Even Megan Smith fussed at her for how unfair it was, but she'd hardly noticed pregnancy aside from the increasing obstacle of her growing belly, and the Healers had checked and double-checked that she could possibly be having twins with such an easy first pregnancy. They had wanted her to take leave a full month before her due date, but she'd taken two days of it and been about to go mad from boredom. It was just not in an Abbott to lie about, and so she'd been back to serving tables and pulling pints, and she was quite pleased that the next generation of innkeepers had been courteous enough to wait until five minutes past closing before her water broke.

**18. She apprenticed at a dungeon to learn how to be a Dominatrix. **  
Maybe it was his inability to let go of responsibility anywhere else, but they discovered relatively quickly that Neville really, really liked it when she was a bit more…assertive in the bedroom. At first, she'd felt a little silly, and she was worried about it going wrong, but there were a few professional sex workers that the Leaky had good relationship with, and she made a some discrete inquiries. The Mistress she chose had almost twenty years experience and had dealt with soldiers before, and Hannah found to her own surprise and delight that once she was no longer afraid of truly hurting him, a little bit of fun with a gag and length of rope could be just the thing to light her wand after a day of "I'll get that for you right away" and "what can I do for you?"

**19. She's damned good with a gun. **  
She had never held one of the Muggle weapons or even seen one in person until the incident at Druim Cett, but she took to it faster than any of the other magical-born, to an extent that surprised everyone but Justin, who laughed that it was just extremely fast and mechanically operated darts, after all. She had laughed, but during the fight against the Fomorians, the power of them left a deep impression on her, and though it would take another five years before she found an excuse to confess it to her husband, she had approached Justin before he was even out of hospital and asked him to teach her. She knows quite well all the levels to which it's incredibly illegal on both sides of the statute, but she does not regret the Browning 9mm magically hidden beneath the Leaky's till, nor the one concealed in her side of the bedframe.

**20. When she was 7 years old, she met a stranger.**  
It was just after sunrise, her favorite time to go out among the flowers while they still glittered with dew, and there was a woman in the garden. She was the most beautiful woman Hannah had ever seen, and it didn't seem at all frightening or odd that she was there, nor that she was naked, with long hair the same deep brown as the soil full of flowers. She had called Hannah to her, and the glittering eyes had been kind as she stroked the girl's cheek and gave her a choice. There was a great power in her, the woman said, and she could be a mighty seed, a mother of empires, the next Morgana or Victoria, bowing to no one and marking the face of the world…or she could be the fulsome earth, steadfast and strong, able to nurture and anchor even the wildest heart and withstand the most ferocious storm.

She chose before the woman had even finished, her bare toes wiggling in the rich loam and her bright laugh ringing, and the woman smiled as she lay her lips on the girl's forehead, whispering three words that sank so deep into her heart that she knew somehow that they were more than a blessing or a promise, and she would bestow them only a few times in her life. On Ernie, the night of the battle. On Neville, when he joined the Aurors. On Susan, when Cecily was born. On Justin, when he first took the oath of the Wizengamot.

_You will stand._


End file.
